This post was co-authored by Timothy Welsh.
In May of 2018, the Psychonomic Society Leading Edge Workshop titled “Time for Action: Reaching for a Better Understanding of the Dynamics of Cognition” was held in Amsterdam. The overarching goal of the workshop was to share and discuss data and theoretical perspectives that advance the understanding of how cognition and action systems are integrated and operate synergistically. This knowledge is critical for generating a complete understanding of human behavior and will help shape the design of everyday objects and technologies as well as training and working environments.
The talks and discussions were live-streamed and viewed by people around the world. Videos of the lectures are now available on the Psychonomic website.
At the end of an intensive 2 days of talks and discussion, the group posed for a picture in the meeting room.
Back row from left-to-right: Paul Cisek, Jeff Moher, Antonia Hamilton, Melvyn Goodale, Heather Neyedli, Deitmar Heinke, Laurel Buxbaum, David Rosenbaum. Front row from left-to-right: Bernhard Hommel, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Laura Thomas, Craig Chapman, Tim Welsh, Max Di Luca, Betty Tuller, Joo-Hyun Song.
The students who were there to enable the live-stream then captured the obligatory selfie:
Selfie row from left-to-right: Christie Gamble, Emma Yoxon.
The workshop gave rise to a special issue in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that was guest edited by the two of us. The publication of the special issue is accompanied by this #time4action digital event.
Why #time4action?
Although it is clear that the products of cognitive processing are expressed through action, there are strong indications that the motor system is not only a receiver of the output of sensory and cognitive processing, but also an active contributor to that processing.
There is mounting evidence that the context of the action and the processes of action planning can influence and shape sensory and cognitive processes. Thus, there appears to be a bidirectional interaction between cognition and action, with cognitive processes shaping the manner in which one executes actions and action demands shaping the way one perceives and thinks about the world.
The Leading Edge Workshop and the #time4action special issue were developed to disseminate past and current work on the interactions between cognition and action, and to chart a course forward for future knowledge generation and translation in this area. To achieve these goals, we sought contributions from researchers across multiple areas, including, but not limited to, psychology, neuroscience, kinesiology, and human-computer interactions, to share and critically evaluate their theoretical, empirical, and translational work.
Summary of themes
The special issue opens with a series of papers that set the theoretical and historical context and provide evidence for the interactions of cognition and action that has emerged from both behavioral and neuroscience fields. These papers contain critical reviews of research and models generated across the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (Rosenbaum and Feghhi; Hommel; Hubbard; Anzulewicz and colleagues; Cole and colleagues; Glass; Flindall and Gonzalez; and Grossberg). The final two papers of this section outline ways of re-conceptualizing sensori-cognitive-motor interactions and aim to inspire new approaches to understanding human behavior (Cisek; Hommel and colleagues).
The second section of the special issue provides reports of new experimental evidence that advances our understanding of human behavior. This research, which has emerged in multiple fields in parallel, converges thematically in that it reveals and emphasizes the possible bi-directional interactions between motor and cognitive processes. The papers in this section address the relation between mechanisms of prioritization, selection, cognitive dynamics, and decision-making and goal-directed actions.
One set of papers reports evidence of the interaction between the motor system and diverse processes as perception (Agauas and Thomas; Dotov and colleagues; Buckingham and Donald), visual search (Meghanathan and colleagues ; Smith and colleagues), agency (Potts and Carlson), music (London and colleagues; Greenspon and Pfordresher), recognition of object-directed actions (Decroix and Kalénine), cognitive load (VonderHaar and colleagues), and learning and memory (Wakefield and colleagues; Halvorson and colleagues; Zhou and Mou).
A second set of papers employ motion capture and other technologies to record the trajectories and patterns of movements to generate new understanding of the dynamics of cognitive processes such as language (Lins and Schöner), social cues (Yoxon and colleagues), and symbolic cues (Swansburg and Neyedli). Finally, given the growth in using different types of movement and motion capture systems in studies of sensori-cognitive-motor systems, we conclude the special issue with a set of papers that address both theoretical and methodological issues (Ruitenberg and colleagues; Grage and colleagues [no link available]; and Moher and Song).